Sermon Sunday July 20th, 2025
Rev. Norman A. Michaud
Colossians 1:15-20 is commonly understood as a hymn that predated the Letter to the Colossians. Reading the text from the NSRV or our Pew Bible, it seems to me that this passage is not a hymn or poem. However, every commentary I read in preparation for this sermon focuses on the idea that Colossians 15-28 is a hymn or psalm.
In Eugene Peterson’s Bible translation, The Message, he attempts to avoid a literal, word-for-word translation. His translation attempts to provide a version paraphrased into contemporary American English. Peterson is a scholar, but his understanding prioritizes the meaning or vibe of passages. He wants us to read and hear the poetry of the Biblical language so that we may feel closer to the ideas presented in the Bible.
I will now read Peterson’s version of Colossians 1:15-20 so that I can share his poetic vision of Paul’s writing, which, I believe, captures Paul’s concept of the Invisible God.
We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen.
We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created.
For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him.
He existed before any of it came into being and holds it all together.
And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body.
He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end.
From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding.
Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.”
His audience could have been familiar with Paul’s hymn as a paraphrase of Jewish psalms, given its Jewish and early Christian context. It calls for us to see God and Christ as one sovereign over all creation, all things, and all time.
The Christ hymn develops a cosmic understanding of Jesus’ person. God’s realm lives in Christ. What Christ commands is the way of God, a God of justice and freedom from oppression. Verses 16 and 17 establish Christ’s sovereignty over all creation. Not only is everything created in Christ, but it is also “held together” in him and through him. All time and all events in time live in Christ.
All Creation receives nourishment through Christ, who sustains all that exists. In verses 18-20, Paul calls Christians to believe that Christ alone is the head of the church. Colossian’s hymn parallels the language of Ephesians (1:22-23): “He has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
Paul’s writing reflects his opposition to Roman power and law.
The New Covenant of love and equality through Christ opposes Roman imagination, where Caesar represents the ultimate force on Earth.
Reading in this context, it is no wonder that the Irish theologian John Philip Newell writes and speaks about Celtic Christianity in such glowing terms. All life, including the living, breathing planet, is God’s creation and Christ’s imagination. The emphasis in Celtic Christianity is that all things show the “God Spark.”
In a world in which images of Caesar were everywhere and crucified victims of oppression lined Roman highways like road markers, Paul’s “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) applies to All and Everything.
Roman mythology regarded emperors as having a lineage to Grecian gods. Paul states in Colossians and elsewhere that Christ is “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). This claim supersedes Roman models of authority.
In a culture in which the emperor or leader represented all authority, Paul proclaims not only that “all things in heaven and on earth were created … through him and for him …” but specifically that all “rulers” and “powers” are subject to Christ’s rule (Colossians 1:16)! Because of his resurrection, he is the one who will come to “have first place in everything” (Colossians 1:18).
Rome sees itself as exceptional and views its role as a force for good and order against barbarian terrorists and the fearful chaos that lies at the Empire’s borders. Paul says that Christ “is before all things, and in him, all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
Paul pulls away the Empire’s cloak of myth. If Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, then Caesar isn’t. If Jesus is the head of all, then Caesar and all rulers become subject and servants of the New Covenant, to love by action. To not show love in action is to reject the New Covenant.
But Paul isn’t finished yet. In an empire that views Caesar as the “head” of all Rome’s Empire, Paul tells the Colossians, who follow Jesus, that Christ “is the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:18). Just as Jesus replaces Caesar, following Jesus’s Way replaces the rule of Roman law and the concept of Roman freedom, which means to obey or get out, and out can mean torture, imprisonment, and death.
I hope that each of us can recognize our role in following Christ’s teachings. Sometimes that means voicing our resistance to actions that promote the Empire and devalue each person, science, the health of the planet, and the hope for eternal life.
The Pax Romana, or Peace of Rome, was proclaimed as the accomplishment of the Empire. But we know how Rome maintained the peace, don’t we? On crosses littering the landscape, order was established by Rome and secured through the eradication of all opposition. Paul turns the imperial cruelty on its head. He says that Jesus demonstrates that he is the one in whom the very fullness of God dwells, and indeed “reconciles to himself all things” by “making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). Here is the new rule for all. Here is the Realm of God born in the flesh. Christ’s blood remains alive as the bread and wine of Logos, the word and spirit of the triune God.
Paul then pushes the cosmic scope of God’s realm, this reconciliation of “all things” (Colossians 1:20), to its limit when he says that this gospel “has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven” (Colossians 1:23). And he meant it. All of creation has heard the good news. It is only humans who have a hard time seeing what is before their faces.